Day Two of Internet World 2012

Rebecca D'CunhaPosted on 27th Apr 2012

Share:

This year is the 20th anniversary of Internet World and as Steve said in the last blog post, Gravytrain are attending for all of the 3 days. Day 2 was mine and Alex’s turn to visit Internet World (on the wettest day of the year, but still worth it!).

Alex and I got the venue and while we drip dried we listened to Markus Fehr from e-Spirit. He talked about integrating CMS and online shopping to an already substantial business that is offline. It was interesting to hear how many businesses are still wary about having an online presence as they feel it may discourage shoppers from their local stores. However, as the world is now largely on the internet, the amounts of visits to local shops are declining and those businesses that don’t have an online presence are realising this.

The next was a talk on email testing. Sean Duffy from Email Center showed us that by using a multivariate testing technique we could see a 45% increase from email marketing. Here we learned that an email testing plan was something to avoid as you need to be dynamic and that each test is a trial and therefore not to worry if the results are negative.

The last talk Alex and I attended, I thought, was the best out of the three. It was hosted by Luca Benini from Europe, Buddy Media. Here he spoke about “The elusive ROI of social media: Tracking connections through sales.” Luca spoke about how actually, the ROI is not elusive. He said that by interacting with consumers, many are drawn away from the customer service phone line and are more inclined to tweet or post, which is a lot cheaper to reply to and therefore, is an instant return on investment from social media. This was one of the points Luca said was a way to measure ROI from social media. The others included: Brand equity, shareholder value, “talkability” for a TV show, Web traffic referrals and sales. He gave an interesting statistic about web traffic referrals that showed more traffic was generated from Facebook to YouTube than from Google to YouTube.

This shows the complete shift in the way people access information and highlights the importance of having a presence on social media sites.